Part I: Summer

Chapter 1
June 1989

Alex bloodied Ben’s nose. It wasn’t intentional; it was a mishap, nothing more. It was just that Alex stood a few inches taller than Ben, so when he wheeled around to face the basket, clutching the basketball firmly in both hands, his elbow tagged Ben’s nose. Alex registered the blow and saw the surreal stop-motion frames of no blood/blood on Ben’s face, but he didn’t stop playing. Neither did Ben. They both continued to jostle and fight for position until the worn rubber ball finally rattled through the mostly-round-entirely-netless metal rim on the playground of Brantley Elementary.

As soon as the play ended Alex rushed over to Ben, who was bent over watching his blood blend into a pool of rain water still collecting on the steaming blacktop. It seemed that every time the boys planned to play basketball a roving band of mischievous rain clouds suddenly emerged from lurking behind the peaks of the Wasatch Mountains. Ben and Alex would play in any conditions.

“You okay, man?” Alex asked, tempering his genuine concern with feigned masculine callousness.

“Yeah, no sweat. Only blood. That’s just like you, always resorting to the cheap shot!” Ben smiled, a disconcerting expression with the blood collecting on his upper lip, tinting his widely spaced teeth pink, and trailing off under his chin and down his throat.

“Alright, tough guy, let’s go get you cleaned up. You’re scaring the little kids.”

“What kids?” Ben asked, peering around at the deserted playground.

“Precisely.”

Nearly every day of that summer of 1989 was the same: the two friends would get together after finishing their morning chores, then spend the day playing basketball or football, tormenting Ben’s younger siblings, or catching some of the swarming grasshoppers in the vacant lot near the Armour’s house. The activity didn’t particularly matter; it was but a backdrop for their ambitious conversation.

Ben and Alex laughed as they climbed the hill up to Ben’s house. Alex made a point of waving at old Mrs. Clark, the Armour’s nosy next door neighbor, who was not as aged as her scowl made her appear. The drapes in her front window swished closed and the boys shared another laugh.

They avoided the two entrances on the main floor, where Ben’s mother was sure to be, and slipped surreptitiously into the basement through the sliding glass doors. Ben pulled off his blood-stained shirt and soaked it in the bathroom sink while Alex made himself at home on Ben’s king-sized waterbed. Alex did not even glance at the award-winning models of fighter jets that lined the shelves of Ben’s room, but was drawn intently to the detailed map of Russia on the opposite wall. Alex and Ben had taken one year of Russian together the previous school year, the first year it had been offered for the ninth grade, and would continue the course in the fall. Ben crossed the hall into his room and over his slender torso pulled on a clean white t-shirt with “Brantley Football” emblazoned in green block letters across it. In two weeks time Ben and Alex would begin the conditioning regimen that culminated in August with two-a-day football practices, commonly known as “Hell Week.”

“If you could get into the Soviet Union, where would you go?” Alex kicked off another hypothetical discussion, one of the many carried on by the two limitless plotters. Ben welcomed the renewed discussion.

“Well Leningrad and Moscow are obvious starting points. But I’d also like to take the Trans-Siberian over to Novosibirsk, Lake Baikal, then on to Vladivostok. That’s an important naval base, you know.”

Ben knew not only all of the U.S. bases, ships, and aircraft, but those of Northern Europe and the U.S.S.R. as well. It was his hobby, bordering on obsession.

“You?”

“I’d start the same, spend a minimum of ten days in each city, but I don’t think I’d cross the Urals. I’d take a leisurely sail down the Neva to the steppes. Maybe I could find some of those women that Pushkin immortalized!”

“The ones that bite when they kiss? Dream on! We both know that you still belong to the V.L. club!”

“Ah, but my lips are virgin by choice, not by force like yours, fish face!”

“Uh-huh, right. You really are a dreamer. Good luck finding those southern women in Finland, by the way.”

“Say what?”

“The Neva doesn’t flow south; it flows from Lake Ladoga into the Gulf of Finland. You have it confused with the Volga, you neophyte.”

The error alone stung Alex’s pride; having Ben correct him was interminably more severe. Ben would not allow the most minor misspeaking slide, but neither would Alex. Ben tended to handle it more magnanimously than Alex did, however.

“Hey, you know nautical matters better than I do, fish face.”

“And aeronautical, you earthbound clod.”

“Earthbound? Who dunked on whom just now?”

“That’s no great feat; when your arms are long enough to drag your knuckles on the ground you don’t need to jump to dunk!”

Despite being facetious, Ben had a point: the rim they played on was a good foot-and-a-half lower than regulation.

“I’ll show you the capabilities of my knuckles!” Alex said as he launched into Ben’s chest and the boys began to wrestle clumsily.

“Watch the nose!”

“That thing is hard to miss!”

They rough-housed until they noticed Ben’s mom standing in the doorway.

“Get ready for dinner,” she said. “Alex I’ve already set a place for you, so call home and let your mother know you’ll be staying.”

Sue Armour went back upstairs to the kitchen while the boys washed the summer grime from their hands. Alex called his house from the phone downstairs, then the boys raced up the single flight of narrow stairs.